Re: Oldest SF not necessarily most dated?

Mike stone <mwstone@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>> Mike Van Pelt wrote:
>> > Tim McDaniel <tmcd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> >> John Schilling  <schillin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> >>> I don't think anyone, from the early '80s on at least, was
>> >>> terribly surprised to see the Soviet economy collapse.
>> >>
>> >> I think your memory has improved itself. Getting shabbier
>> >> and less competitive gradually, many thought, but I don't
>> >> recall anyone projecting *collapse*.
>> >
>> > The only example I can think of is some of the historical
>> > backstory in the (1955 Hugo winner) "The Darfsteller", by
>> > Walter Miller, IIRC. The historical play within the story,
>> > "The Anarch", is about the fall of the Soviet Union. (In
>> > Miller's history, it was not a mostly-peaceful collapse;
>> > The People were exacting gruesome revenge on the commissars.)
>>
>> The backstory to RAH's "Gulf" includes a Communist state (whether
>> worldwide or US-only I'm not sure) which had fallen eighty-five years
>> before, with the execution of the last commissar.
>
>Iirc, doesn't _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_ contain a reference to "When
>the Commissars were running things on earth"? I think it realated to how
>some iof the population of *"Hong Kong Luna" got sent there.
>
>Poul Anderson also used the idea at least twice. "The High Ones" is set
on
>an interstellar space****p originally sent out by a "United World SSR"
which
>has been taken over by dissidents, while "The Pugilist" is set in a world
>where the US, presumably along with many other places, is a Soviet
>satellite, though China and Japan are still independent (and allied
against
>the SU).

And Blish's _Cities in Flight_ didn't have it as a collapse, exactly -
more
like the sound a deflating balloon makes, as the various factories leaked
away from the Earth out into the Western star systems...

Dave
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